DANTE DID NOT WRITE THE INFERNO AS A HORROR STORY. HE WROTE IT AS A MAP.
The Divine Comedy begins in darkness, in a forest, at midpoint of life, completely lost. Before Dante can ascend through Paradise, he must first descend through every circle of hell. This was not an accident of narrative structure. It was the teaching.
The journey upward is only available to the one who has first gone all the way down. There is no shortcut that bypasses the descent and arrives at the light. Virgil does not lead Dante around the underworld. He leads him through it.
Every tradition that has mapped the inner journey has placed this same requirement at its center. The alchemical process begins with the nigredo, the blackening, the stage of putrefaction in which everything the ego has constructed is dissolved.
The Sufi path requires the annihilation of the self before union with the divine becomes possible. The shamanic initiation across cultures involves a symbolic death, the dismemberment of the old self, before the healer can return with the capacity to heal others.
Jung called this the night sea journey, the descent into the unconscious that precedes genuine transformation.
The reason most people do not reach paradise is not that they are incapable of it. It is that they are unwilling to begin in hell. They want the ascent without the descent, the light without the darkness, the resolution without the suffering that makes resolution possible.
Hell, in Dante’s framework, is not punishment. It is the honest confrontation with what is. The souls in the Inferno are not there arbitrarily, they are experiencing the full reality of the choices they made in life. To walk through hell is to see clearly. And clarity, however painful, is the beginning of every genuine ascent.
The path does not avoid the darkness. The path goes through it.
What descent have you been refusing to make, and what might be waiting for you on the other side of it?
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Our strengths and weaknesses tend to be connected. Curiosity and distractibility, Determined and stubbornness. Conformity has us sanding down our edges — and wondering why nothing cuts.
@StewartalsopIII I watched something a while back where a guy was going up to extremely attractive women and acting like they were his ex. Gets rid of social awkwardness and implants the idea that his ex must have been hot also 😂
@StewartalsopIII I recently rewarched apocoloypto…. A lot of people upon viewing my list said something along the lines of…. Apocolypto is such a great movie, it can’t possibly be 60!!!???? Well it is great movie in that it hauntingly captures the 60 energy field of that general period 😂❤️
@StewartalsopIII One of the reasons I’ve leaned away from publishing movie calibrations is because most casual readers don’t understand what the calibration actually means. It has nothing to do with how artistically well done it is but the energy field the art captures.